A Darker Shade of Blue (36 page)

GHOSTS

It was mid-morning, and Kiley was in his office two floors above a charity shop in Tufnell Park, stranded between his second cup of coffee and his third. ‘
Investigations
', read the ad in the local press, ‘
Private and Confidential. All kinds of security work undertaken. Ex-Metropolitan Police
.' The absence of carpet made it easier to hear footsteps on the stairs. A pause and then a knock.

She was late thirties, dressed ten years younger, and looked all of forty-five, with the eyes of someone who woke up every day expecting to be disappointed and was rarely, if ever, disabused.

‘Jack Kiley? Rita Barnes.'

Her hand was all cheap rings and bone.

Kiley knew the name and a moment later he knew why.

‘Bradford Barnes, he was my son.'

The flowers had spread across the pavement close to the spot less than a hundred metres away where he'd been killed; tiny candles had burned through the night. Photographs and messages taped to the wall. ‘
Always remembered
'. ‘
A tragic waste
'. Bradford had been on the way home from a party, not late, a little after twelve, and had inadvertently brushed the shoulder of a young woman heading the other way. When he'd stopped to apologise, one of the men with her had raised his voice and then his fist. Punches flew and then a knife. When the group sauntered off laughing they left Bradford where he lay. A still-warm statistic, choking on his own blood. The twenty-second young person to have been stabbed to death in the capital that year and still months to go. Gang stuff, drug deals gone sour; the wrong look, the wrong word, the wrong place at the wrong time. Respect.

‘I remember,' Kiley said.

The flowers had long since faded and been swept away; the photographs torn down.

‘A year ago next week he was killed,' Rita Barnes said, ‘three days short of his birthday, an' the police still i'n't got a bloody clue.'

She took an envelope from her bag and counted the notes out on his desk. ‘There's two hundred and fifty. I'll get more. Find the bastard as did it, okay?'

What was he supposed to say? It was a waste of his time and her money?

Well, he had the time.

When she'd gone he put in a call to a DI he knew at the local nick. Jackie Ferris met him in the back room of the Assembly House, its dark wood panelling and ornamented windows harking back to palmier days.

‘Not got a clue, that's what she says?' Still on duty, Ferris was drinking lemon and lime.

‘She's wrong?'

‘We've had more than a clue since day one. Russell Means. It was his girlfriend Barnes bumped into. He's got form and a mouth to go with it, but forensics didn't give us shit and, surprise, surprise, no one's talking. Least, not to us.' Ferris raised her glass. ‘You might have more luck.'

Rachel Sams lived on the seventh floor of an eight-floor block close to the closed-down swimming pool on Prince of Wales Road. Three of the flats on her level were boarded up and padlocked fast. The first two occasions Kiley called she refused to open the door and then, when she did, it was only to slam it in his face. It took a fierce squall of rain – Rachel hunched against the wind as she manoeuvred a buggy laden with supermarket carrier bags and containing a wailing two-year-old – for Kiley to open negotiations.

‘Here, let me help.'

‘Piss off!'

But she stood back while, after freeing the bags and handing them to her, he lifted the buggy and led the way.

Kiley followed her into the flat and, when she didn't complain, closed the door behind him. The interior was dominated by a wide-screen plasma TV, the furniture, most of it, third- or fourth-hand. Toys were scattered, here and there, across the floor. While Rachel changed the child's nappy, Kiley found a jar of instant coffee in the kitchen.

They sat at either end of the sagging settee while the boy piled wooden bricks on top of one another, knocked them down with a loud whoop and started again.

‘Gary, for Christ's sake.'

‘He's Russell Means' boy?' Kiley said.

‘What of it?'

‘Russell see him much?'

‘When he can be bothered.'

‘Bradford Barnes' mother came to see me, a week or so back.'

‘So?'

‘She wants to know what happened to her son.'

‘She buried him, didn't she? What else she wanna know?'

‘She wants to know who killed him. Wants some kind of – I don't know – justice, I suppose.'

‘Yeah, well, she ain't gonna find it here.'

Kiley held her gaze until she looked away.

After that he called round every week or so, sometimes bringing a small present for the boy.

‘Listen,' Rachel said, ‘if you reckon this is gonna get you into my knickers …'

But, stuck up there on the seventh floor, she didn't seem overburdened with friends and now, as soon as he arrived, Gary scrambled up into his lap and happily pulled his hair. Kiley hadn't mentioned Bradford Barnes again.

Ten days short of Christmas, the sky a low, flat, unpromising grey, he got round to the flat to find Rachel hurling bits and pieces over the balcony, tears streaming down her face.

‘That bastard! That lousy bastard!'

Kiley tried to calm her down and she lashed out, drawing blood from his lip. When he finally got her back inside, she was still shaking; Gary cowering in the corner, afraid.

‘One of my mates rung an' told me, he's only gettin' married, i'n, it? To that skanky whore from down Stockwell. Saw it in Facebook or somethin'.' Picking up a half-empty mug, she hurled it against the wall. ‘Well, he's gonna learn he can't treat me like that, i'n he? He's gonna pay.'

Kiley listened while she told him what had happened that night, how Russell Means had stabbed Bradford Barnes three times, once in the neck and twice in the chest, and then walked off laughing. He phoned Jackie Ferris and listened while Rachel told her story again, then promised to look after Gary while the two of them went to the station so that Rachel could make a statement.

Three days later, Russell Means was arrested.

Rita Barnes had tears in her eyes when she came to thank him and ask what more she owed him and Kiley said to forget it, it was fine. He would have given the two-fifty back if it hadn't been for a little matter of paying the rent.

‘You're sure?'

‘Sure.'

She kissed him on the cheek.

That night, Kiley walked past the spot where Bradford Barnes had been killed. If you looked closely, you could just make out the marks where the photos had been taped, a young man smiling out, his life ahead of him, ghosts on the wall.

TROUBLE IN MIND

Kiley smoothed the page across his desk and read it again: a survey conducted by Littlewoods Pools had concluded that of all ninety-two Premiership and Football League soccer teams, the one most likely to cause its supporters severe stress was Notts County. Notts County! Sitting snug, the last time Kiley had looked, near the midpoint of the League Two table and in immediate danger neither of relegation nor the nail-biting possibilities of promotion via the play-offs. Whereas Charlton Athletic, in whose colours Kiley had turned out towards the end of his short and less than illustrious career, were just one place from the bottom of the Premiership, with only four wins out of a possible twenty-two. Not only that, despite having sacked two successive managers before Christmas, this Saturday just past they had been bundled out of the FA Cup by Nottingham Forest, who had comprehensively stuffed them at the City ground, two–nil.

Stress? Stress didn't even begin to come close.

Kiley looked at the clock.

12:09.

Too late for morning coffee, too early for lunch. From his office window he could see the traffic edging in both directions, a pair of red 134 buses nuzzling up to one another as they prepared to run the gauntlet of Kentish Town Road on their way west towards the city centre, the slow progress of a council recycling lorry holding up those drivers who were heading – God help them – for the Archway roundabout and thence all points north.

His in-tray held a bill from the local processing lab, a begging letter from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and a polite reminder from HM Revenue & Customs that the final deadline for filing his tax return was the thirty-first of January – for more details about charges and penalties, see the enclosed leaflet SA352.

His pending file, had he possessed such a thing, would have held details of a course in advanced DNA analysis he'd half-considered after a severe overdose of
CSI;
a letter, handwritten, from a Muswell Hill housewife – a rare, but not extinct breed – wanting to know what Kiley would charge to find out if her husband was slipping around with his office junior – as if – and a second letter, crisply typed on headed notepaper, offering employment in a prestigious security firm run by two former colleagues from the Met. Attractive in its way, but Kiley couldn't see himself happily touching his peaked cap to every four-by-four driver checking out of a private estate in Totteridge and Whetstone on the way to collect Julian and Liberty from private school or indulge in a little gentle shopping at Brent Cross.

Early or not, he thought he'd go to lunch.

The Cook Shop was on the corner of Fortess Road and Raveley Street, a godsend to someone like Kiley who appreciated good, strong coffee or a tasty soup-and-sandwich combo, and which, apart from term-time mornings when it tended to be hysterical with young mums from the local primary school, was pretty well guaranteed to be restful and uncrowded – the owner's abiding penchant for Virgin FM Radio aside.

‘The usual?' Andrew said, turning towards the coffee machine as Kiley entered.

‘Soup, I think,' Kiley said.

Eyebrow raised, Andrew glanced towards the clock. ‘Suit yourself.'

Today it was mushroom and potato, helped along with a few chunks of pale rye bread. Someone had left a newspaper behind and Kiley leafed through it as he ate. Former Labour Education Minister takes her child out of the state system because his needs will be better served elsewhere. Greater transparency urged in NHS. Unseasonably warm weather along the eastern seaboard of the United States. Famous celebrity Kiley had barely heard of walks out of
Big Brother
house in high dudgeon.

An item on the news page caught his eye, down near the bottom of page six. ‘
Roadside bomb kills British soldier on Basra patrol.…
The death of the soldier, whose name was not immediately released, brought the number of British military fatalities in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, to 130
.'

Iraq, Afghanistan – maybe some day soon, Iran.

Kiley pushed the paper aside, used his last piece of bread to wipe around the inside of the bowl, slipped some coins on to the counter, and walked out into the street. Not sunbathing weather exactly, but mild for the time of year. The few greyish clouds moving slowly across the sky didn't seem to threaten rain. When he got back to his office, Jennie was sitting on the stairs; he didn't recognise her straight off and when he did he couldn't immediately recall her name.

‘You don't remember me, do you?'

‘Of course I do.'

‘Really?' A smile crinkled the skin around her grey-green eyes and he knew her then.

‘Jennie,' he said. ‘Jennie Calder.'

Her hair, grown back to shoulder length, was the same reddish shade as before.

Jennie's smile broadened. ‘You do remember.'

The last time Kiley had seen her she had been standing, newly crop-haired, cigarette in hand, outside a massage parlour on Crouch End Hill, ready to go to work. Two years back, give or take.

‘How's your little girl?'

‘Alice? Not so little.'

‘I suppose not.'

‘She's at school. Nursery.'

Kiley nodded. Alice had been clinging to her mother, screaming, wide-eyed, when he had last seen her, watching as Kiley set about the two men who'd been sent by Jennie's former partner to terrorise them, mother and daughter both. Armed with a length of two-by-four and a sense of righteous indignation, he had struck hard first and left the questions for later. Some men, he'd learned, you could best reason with when they were on their knees.

‘How did you find me?' he asked.

‘
Yellow Pages,
' Jennie grinned. ‘Let my fingers do the walking.'

She was what, Kiley wondered, early thirties? No more. Careful make-up, more careful than before; slimmer, too: black trousers with a flare and a grey and white top beneath a long burgundy cardigan, left unfastened.

‘You'd best come in.'

The main room of the second-floor flat served as living room and office both: a wooden desk rescued from a skip pushed into service by the window; a swivel chair, secondhand, bought cheap from the office suppliers on Brecknock Road; a metal shelf unit and filing cabinet he'd ferried over from his previous quarters in Belsize Park. For comfort there was an easy chair that had long since shaped itself around him. A few books, directories; computer, fax and answerphone. A Bose Radio/CD player with an eclectic selection of music alongside: Ronnie Lane, Martha Redbone, Mose Allison, Cannonball Adderley, the new Bob Dylan, old Rolling Stones.

One door led into a small kitchen, another into a shower room and lavatory and, beyond that, a bedroom which took, just, a four-foot bed, a chest of drawers and a metal rail from which he hung his clothes.

Home, of a kind.

‘You haven't been here long,' Jennie said.

‘Observation or have you been asking around?'

Jennie smiled. ‘I spoke to the bloke in the charity shop downstairs.'

‘A couple of months,' Kiley said. ‘The rent in the other place …' He shrugged. ‘Can I get you something? Tea? Coffee? I think there's some juice.'

She shook her head. ‘No, I'm fine.'